Focus on CAMEROON

Country-focused Bulletins

December 18, 2017 Cameroon: Speech, Rights, and Aging Autocracy
Cameroonian-American writer Patrice Nganang, an acclaimed novelist who writes in
French and teaches at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, remains in prison
in Cameroon after his detention at the airport on December 6. His friends and
colleagues around the world have mobilized protests, which has evoked international
attention and pressure. But the aging autocracy of Cameroon President Paul Biya is
pressing charges against him, and is even more resistant to addressing the issues of
discrimination he highlighted in an article just a day before his arrest.

April 25, 2017 Africa/Global: Media Repression 2.0
"In the days when news was printed on paper, censorship was a crude
practice involving government officials with black pens, the seizure
of printing presses and raids on newsrooms. The complexity and
centralization of broadcasting also made radio and television
vulnerable to censorship even when the governments didn't exercise
direct control of the airwaves. ... New information technologies--
the global, interconnected internet; ubiquitous social media
platforms; smart phones with cameras--were supposed to make
censorship obsolete. Instead, they have just made it more
complicated." - Joel Simon, Committee to Protect Journalists, April
25, 2017